Today, Tuesday 9/8, Caitlin Doolin of the Baltimore City Department of Transportation is opening up the discussion of the city’s role in the partnership between drivers and bicyclists.

From the Car to the Bike: Infrastructure, Policy and Red Tape

Livable streets that prioritize walking, biking and transit are proven to improve quality of life, improve economic value of neighborhoods, address equity issues and improve health and safety of our cities. It can seem like while the rest of the world is taking off with protected bike lanes and premium transit investments, Baltimore is struggling to catch up, but the reality is this paradigm shift from the car is difficult everywhere. Believe it or not it was even difficult in Copenhagen 40 years ago! Come learn and engage in a discussion about how infrastructure, policy and politics are shaping how our urban streets serve bicyclists.

Extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, can disrupt how healthcare services are delivered by damaging the infrastructure they depend on. Natural disasters can force hospitals to evacuate. However, evacuation is not without risk. At this seminar, E²SHI Fellow Meghan McGinty will discuss how decisions to either evacuate hospitals or shelter-in-place (continue serving patients on site) were made during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 – and what we can learn from this experience to better prepare for future extreme weather events.

Presenter: Meghan McGinty is a PhD candidate in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research focuses on public health emergency preparedness and response, disaster resilience, and climate change. She is a 2013-14 E2SHI Fellowship recipient. Learn more about Meghan’s research

The rise of mega-disasters this century prompted development of engineering solutions for community and infrastructure resilience. ASCE 7-16 will include a new Chapter 6 Tsunami Loads and Effects, drawn from context of the 2011 Japan Tohoku Tsunami and resulting Fukushima Plant disaster. Chapter 6 is a bottom up state of the art design methodology focused on loss drivers, contrasting with other hazard provisions revised ad-hoc over several decades. The tsunami hazards awakening from the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, claiming nearly 300,000 fatalities, brought attention to need for broad disaster preparedness of vulnerable populations. In the Post 9-11 Security environment, it pushed efforts to develop methods for all-hazards community and infrastructure resilience using multi-faceted research, performance based engineering and improved standards and building codes. Tsunami and other understudied hazards are advancing now with relatively low cost digitized maps, lidar and geospatial tools used for rapid exposure screening, loss modeling and engagement by the insurance and business supply chain industry. The experience from tsunami, and its seismic and flood components is a useful context for understanding disaster resilience using a lifeline infrastructure engineering framework, to help communities identify and prioritize diverse needs. Recent initiatives include the UN Disaster Resilience Scorecard developed by IBM and AECOM in 2014, and the ASCE Infrastructure Resilience Division launched earlier this year. Both support the 2015 UN Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the UN Global Goals for Sustainable Development ratified one month ago in New York for guiding actions over the next 15 years.